Where the God of Love Hangs Out: Fiction (20 page)

Robert said to Julia, “And you must have these,” and he took the huge bunch of pink and yellow alstroemeria from Arthur, flowers they’d gotten for their front hall, and handed them to Julia. She kissed him again and ducked her head into the flowers, sniffing, although there was no real scent, and she exclaimed, like a girl, all the way home.

Lionel and Julia walked behind the others.

“You think the boys should go over there?”

Julia turned on him. “He’s an old friend of mine, Lionel. He was a friend of your father’s and he was extending himself, out of kindness, to my
grandchildren
.” And Lionel was glad he didn’t say what he was thinking.

Finally, someone does go to the grocery store and people sit, in knots of two or three, on the deck, or walk on the beach or walk in and out of Julia’s room. Lionel and Buster smoke on the front porch. Someone orders in bad pizza and they eat it off paper plates and even Jewelle does nothing more in the kitchen than dump the cold slices in a pile and refrigerate them. By ten o’clock, Buster and Jewelle are listening to Lionel and Patsine in the next room. Lionel is talking angrily and Patsine makes a soft, soothing sound. Then Lionel gets up and goes down the hall for a glass of water and they can hear everything, even the click of the bedroom door as Lionel closes it. Patsine asks a question and Lionel gets back into bed and then there is more whispering and a little uncertain laughter and then Buster is glad he can’t see Jewelle’s face while his brother gets a blow job.

When Buster was fifteen and Lionel was twenty-five, Julia sent Buster to spend the summer with his brother in Paris. Buster spent his days riding the Métro, listening to music from home, and trying to pick up girls. At night, Lionel made dinner for them both.

“How’s it goin’? With the ladies?”

Buster shrugged. Lionel poured them both a glass of wine.

“Listen to me,” Lionel said, “and not to those assholes back home. You do not want to get advice from sixteen-year-old boys. You don’t want to be the kind of guy who just grabs some tit or a handful of pussy and then goes and tells his friends so they can say, ‘You da man.’”

“No,” Buster said.

“That’s right, no, you don’t. You want to be the kind of man women beg for sex. You want women saying, ‘Oh, yes, baby, yes, baby, yes’” and on the last “yes,” he got up, took a peach from a bowl on the counter, and sliced it in half. He threw the pit into the wastebasket and he put the fruit, shiny side up, in Buster’s hand.

“Here you go. See that little pink point. You got to lick that little point, rub your tongue over and around it.” He smacked Buster on the back of the head. “Don’t slobber. You’re not a washcloth. You. Are. A. Lover.”

Buster breathed in peach smell and he flicked his tongue at the tiny point.

“That’s it, that’s what I’m talking about. Lick it. It won’t bite you, boy. Lick it again. Now, you get in there with your nose and your chin.”

“My nose,” Buster said, and Lionel pressed the tip of Buster’s nose into the peach.

“Your nose, your chin. Your forehead, if that’s what it takes.”

Buster gave himself to the peach until there was nothing but exhausted peach skin and bits of yellow fruit clinging to his face.

Lionel handed him a dish towel.

“How long do you do it for?” Buster asked.

“How long? Until her legs are so tight around your head you can’t actually hear the words but you know she’s saying, Don’t stop, don’t stop, oh, my God in heaven, don’t you stop.”

“And then what?” Buster picked up another peach, just in case.

“And you keep on. And then she comes. Unless. Unless, you’re slurping away down there for ten minutes and nothing’s happening, you know, and all of a sudden she arches her back like this”—and Lionel arched his back, until his head was almost to the floor—“and she yells, Oh, Jesus, I’m coming.” Lionel screamed. And then said, “If that happens, she’s faking.”

Buster almost choked on this, the thought that he would practice all summer, become as good a lover as his brother, and then the girl would only be pretending to like it?

“Oh, why would she do that?”

Lionel shrugged. “Because she doesn’t want to embarrass your sorry ass and she also doesn’t want to lie there all night, waiting for nothing.”

“That happens?”

Lionel poured them both another glass. “Oh, yes. Sometimes you do your best, and it’s not good enough. So you man up, limp dick, shattered spirit. You pick yourself up and you say to her, Tell me what you really want. You say to her, Put your little hand where you want mine to be.” Lionel drains his glass. “And you do like she shows you. Don’t worry—the ladies are going to love you, Buster.”

And Buster wraps his arm around his wife’s soft waist, beneath her nightgown, and she pulls it up and places his hand on her breast. Their dance is Buster’s palm settling over her nipple, his fingertips sliding up the side of her breast, Jewelle rolling over to put her face next to Buster’s, Jewelle licking at the creases in Buster’s neck. Jewelle runs her hand along the smooth underside of his belly and he sighs.

“Oh, you feel so good,” she says. “You always do.”

“My Jewelle,” he says.

“Oh, yes,” she says. “No one else’s.”

They love this old dance.

“I think we should do it right away. We’re all here.” Jewelle has waited for Lionel to speak but he’s been lying on the couch for ten minutes, not saying a word.

“What is the ‘it’?” Patsine asks.

Jewelle looks at Patsine. Patsine has something pointed and sensible to say about everything, all the time.

“I think the ‘it’ is a memorial service.”

Lionel lifts his head a bit, so he can see everyone.

“I hope that little sonofabitch dies,” he says, and he sits up, changing his tone. “You know, her wishes were very clear. Cremation and lunch. No clergy, no house of worship, and no big deal. Obit in the
Cranberry Bog Times
or whatever and that’s it.”

“Cremation?” Patsine asks, and shrugs when everyone looks at her. Julia was not her mother and it’s not her business but she liked Julia very much and she would not slide a beloved into the mouth of a furnace by way of farewell.

“Why not? It’s not like she was Jewish,” Corinne says. It really isn’t Patsine’s place to ask all of these questions when she’s been married to Uncle Lionel for about five minutes.

“Her father was Jewish,” Lionel says, and everyone looks at him.

“Her father was Jewish? Julia was half Jewish?” Jewelle says.

“Well, not the side that counts,” Lionel says.

“I’m part Jewish?” Corinne says.

“Yes,” Lionel says. “You are not only a quadroon, you are also, fractionally, a Jewess. You can be blackballed by
everyone.”

Buster puts his hand on Corinne’s shoulder and shakes his head at his brother.

“Nice.”

Lionel lies back down. He recites.

“Ma’s mother was Italian. Her father was Jewish. We never met either of them. The old man ran off and left them when Ma was a girl and her mother raised her nothing, which is why we are the faithless heathen we are. Long after the divorce, the old man dies in a car accident—I think.” He looks at Buster, in case he’s gotten it wrong—it’s thirty-five years since he heard the story—but Buster shrugs. He was even younger when Julia told them the story and it doesn’t seem to him that he ever heard it again. Buster shrugs again, to show that he’s already forgiven his brother for teasing Corinne. She needs it; his daughter has become like fucking Goebbels on the subject of race and he can’t stand it. “He never remarried and he left all his money to Ma’s mother. She went on a round-the-world cruise after Ma graduated college and then … she dies. That’s all, folks.” Lionel spreads his arms wide, like Al Jolson.

Patsine says flatly, “Jewish men do not abandon their wives.”

Is that so, Jewelle thinks. She guesses some French Jewish married man sometime must have not left his wife for Miss Patsine Belfond, and Jewelle arches an eyebrow at Corinne. Lionel kisses Patsine’s puffy ankle. He loves her politically incorrect and sensible assertions. Fat people do eat too much. Some people should be sterilized. The darker people’s skins, the noisier they are, until you get to certain kinds of Africans who are as silent as sand.

“Well, apparently one did,” Lionel says cheerfully. “Although Grandpa Whoever, Morris, Murray, Yitzhak, made up for it by leaving Grandma Whoever a lot of money, which was great until she died of food poisoning in Shanghai or—”

“Bangkok.” Buster says. “Bhutan?”

“Burma?”

“She died of food poisoning?” Corinne says.

“Bad shrimp,” Lionel says, closing his eyes.

He hears his brother say, “Or crab,” and he smiles.

“People don’t
die
from food poisoning,” Corinne says.

Jewelle has had enough. “Your aunt Helen almost died from food poisoning when we were girls. We were at the state fair and she got so sick from the fried clams she was hospitalized for it. She vomited for three days and she was skinny as a stick anyway. She really almost died.” Corinne and Jordan stare at their mother. Their aunt Helen is big and imperturbable, a tax lawyer who brings her own fancy wine and her own pillow when she visits, and it’s impossible to imagine her young and skinny, barfing day and night until she almost died.

Lionel presses his feet against his wife’s strong thigh and keeps his eyes shut. If he keeps them closed long enough, everyone but Patsine and Buster will disappear, his mother will reappear, and the worst headache he has ever had will go away.

“I guess there are always things people don’t know about each other. I didn’t know that about Helen and the clams.” Buster takes out a pencil. “I think we should do a little planning, for the service, the lunch, for Ma.”

“Fuck you,” Lionel says.

“I know.”

Robert has been standing in the doorway for about half a minute, listening to his friend’s children. He wants to write it all down and tell Julia after. You wouldn’t
believe
it, he’d say. They are all just like you said. Lionel is completely the master of the universe—you must have loved him a lot, darling, to give him that self-confidence—and Buster is Ted E. Bear on the outside but very strong on the inside; you’d sleep with Lionel but you’d marry Buster, is what I’m saying. Well, not you, of course, but me—back in the day. And poor Jewelle, doomed to be runner-up, isn’t she, even with those absolutely fantastic tits and still workin’ it, but my God, Patsine, what a piece of work. Don’t ask her if that dress makes you look fat because she
will
tell you. But I can see why you were thrilled she married Lionel. She has bent that man to her will and he is so glad, I can tell you that. Jordan’s a love; he’s like Buster, although maybe without the brains. Julia would pretend to smack him and he would apologize and she would say, Go on, go on eviscerating my loved ones, you terrible man. And he’d say, Corinne, my God, that child is why convents were
invented
. And Ari is very sexy in that broody, miserable way but it’s hard to see what exactly one would
do
with him. And Julia would look at him and he would say, I’m just sharing my observations, and she would say, You should be locked up, and he would say, And then you’d miss me, and she would say, Yes, I would, and I’d visit you in jail once a month and bring you porn.

Corinne sees Robert first and she pokes her uncle Lionel. They all look over at Robert and they all say hello, more or less.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Jewelle says.

“No, thank you. I’m sorry to disturb you. I just thought I would … come by.”

“We’re planning a service, just a lunch,” Lionel says, and Robert can see how hard the man is trying to be civil. “Maybe you want to say a few words.”

“Yes,” Robert says to the roomful of people who don’t want him there. He is an impediment; he is an awful, faggy roadblock to their mother’s memory, and the sooner he picks up his odds and ends and goes back to Old Fagland, the better. Robert is not a brave man; he has stood up for himself a couple of times, in a polite way, over the course of seventy years, but he isn’t the kind of person who stays where he isn’t wanted. Julia was. Julia was just that kind of person, going where she wasn’t wanted, telling people to go fuck themselves, and Julia had loved him. He had braided her long gray hair and they had discussed whether or not she should cut it after all this time, and he had rubbed moisturizer into the dry skin between her shoulder blades and trailed his fingers down her spine and toward the small folds of skin above her waist. Julia said, No playing with my love handles. Robert had leaned forward to kiss them and said, Lovely, lovely handles. Robert pulls up a chair and he pats Jewelle on the knee.

“If I may change my mind, coffee would be lovely.”

Lionel says, “Maybe some Marion Williams in the background?”

Robert says, “Absolutely. Julia was playing ‘Remember Me’ just the other day.”

The day after the luncheon, they are still cleaning up. Buster washes and Lionel dries and Jewelle, who knows where everything goes, directs the putting away. Patsine sits at the kitchen table, with her feet up on a chair. Buster sings, “Some of these days, you’re gonna miss me, honey,” and Lionel growls, “Some of these days, you’re gonna miss me, babe,” and Patsine and Jewelle look at each other, eyes welling up, for their grieving husbands.

“Be useful,” Jewelle says to the boys, and she gives them both platters to put into the sideboard. There’s no point in giving them the wineglasses. Corinne pokes her head into the kitchen and disappears.

“Corinne,” her mother says. “I could use a hand here.”

Corinne walks into the middle of the kitchen in her grandmother’s black T-shirt, her own yoga pants, her mother’s black patent-leather pumps, and a green-and-black silk scarf tied around her neck, Apache-style. (“A-patch,” her grandmother said. “It’s a dance, not a rodeo.”) Her eyes are bright red.

“Nana loved this song,” Corinne says. “So, okay.”

Buster dries his hands and Lionel and his brother stand with their arms around each other.

“Pretty legs, great big knockers, that’s what sells them tickets at the door. Honey, these are real show stoppers, it’s what keeps ’em comin’ back for more.”